Victor Sardenberg

Designing with Robots: Navigating the Unknown to Unlock Creativity and Innovation. Read it here. Andrea Kondziela, Victor Sardenberg, Mirco Becker, Ena Lloret-Fritschi. Integrating robotic technologies into architectural education offers significant potential beyond technical skill development. Applied as a pedagogical medium, robotics in architecture can foster creativity, critical thinking, and innovation through experiential, open-ended learning experiences. While most applied teaching formats in architectural robotics prioritise pre-defined, task-specific assignments, they often neglect the value of exploratory design approaches that encourage innovative discoveries. This study presents an abductive design methodology that supports an exploratory design approach through navigating complex, ambiguous, and evolving problems. By embracing uncertainty, emergent processes, and material-driven responses, this approach enables the formulation of plausible hypotheses and innovative ideas, providing space for creative inquiry. Robotic systems become active agents within iterative design processes. Drawing on selected case studies, the paper demonstrates how robotics can be meaningfully integrated into exploratory architectural education and reimagined as a transformative component within open-ended design environments. Keywords: Architectural Robotics, Abductive Reasoning, Exploratory Design Process, Architectural Education, Design Innovation.